Mona Kareem

Mona Kareem (she/they) is an Assistant Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature in the Department of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She holds a PhD from the State University of New York at Binghamton. Her research focuses on literary cultures of race and ethnicity in the Global South, particularly Afro-Asian encounters in the Arabian Peninsula/Persian Gulf region, with interdisciplinary work spanning Arab, South Asian, and African studies.

• Education: PhD, State University of New York at Binghamton

Her scholarship explores themes of migration, cultural aesthetics, and decolonial practices in literature and translation. Prior to her current role, she held visiting positions at Tufts University, Princeton University, the University of Maryland, and Berlin’s Forum Transregionale Studien. Her work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Zora Neale Hurston Fellowship. She is also an editor at The Massachusetts Review and active in the Modern Languages Association’s West Asian forum.

• Awards: Zora Neale Hurston Fellowship (Bard College), National Endowment for the Arts Grant

Kareem’s creative work includes three poetry collections and translations of authors like Octavia Butler and Ashraf Fayadh. Her poetry has been featured in POETRY, Poetry Northwest, and Modern Poetry in Translation.